Anything green is bad (except grapes). Cabbage, broccoli, lettuce...most vegetables in fact. Try the pepper test sometime. Red and yellow peppers taste the same as green ones, but slice them all into a spag boll sauce and nine times out of ten the red and yellow ones are scoffed down, the green ones end up going in the bin.

So we do battle several times a day to get a "balanced diet" into them.

We know that the foods they like are rich in protein and carbohydrates, salt and sugar. And the ones they dislike contain the vitamins and fibre they need.

One of the questions we regularly get as foster carers is "How's the child eating?" My usual reply is "Improving" Why? Because I find if you stick at it gently, their preferences slowly change course. It's a long haul.

But getting back to horsemeat in burgers. For me, the concern is not what sort of animal is in the burger, but which bit of the animal. Whether it's true or not, we all suspect that some burgers and sausages contain "trimmings" - the flesh and organs that butchers can't put out on the shelves for sale. We also suspect that some factory farmed livestock are fed to get them right for the market, not the human stomach, I've heard stories about things like hormones, fattening agents and generic antibiotics.

Do I give my looked-after children the full lowdown on all this? No. Hell no.

Why? Dammit they've suffered enough to be allowed to enjoy one of their only true comforting pleasures.

I'll stick to my tactic of well whizzed home made vegetable soup (comes out beige you see).

And anyway, I told my eldest about my views on processed meat and he came back after a Google session to announce that tests showed that even some organically grown fruit and vegetables contained traces of lead (from passing cars) nitrates (possibly from contaminated rainfall) and bacteria presumably from the hands of the people who grew them.

Hope I haven't put you off your next meal. Foster carers deserve to enjoy the pleasure and comfort of eating too.